Dog owners may have trouble remembering which toy Mr Squeaky is, but such names can be burned into their pets’ memories, researchers have found.
Scientists have previously discovered some dogs has a remarkable ability to learn the names of toys, with a border collie known as Chaser learning the labels of over 1,000 objects.
Now researchers have discovered that some dogs can remember the name of a toy even if they haven’t seen it for two years.
Shany Dror of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, the first author of the study, said the results showed that such dogs had stored object names in their long-term memory, rather than their memory simply being refreshed by their owners by frequent interaction with the item. play.
Dror added that the findings could have implications for understanding the evolution of human language, as memory is one of its many components. “Why is language uniquely human? To understand this, we need to understand which parts of language are available in other animals and which part is not,” she said.
Writing in the journal Biology Letters, Dror and colleagues report how they studied five dogs that had learned the names of 12 new toys in earlier research. These toys were then put away for two years.
In the new study, the dogs’ owners brought the toys out of retirement. Three dogs had all 12, another had 11 toys and one dog only had five toys as some were misplaced.
After allowing their dog to inspect the objects, each owner placed five or six of the “test” toys in one room in their home, along with eight of their dog’s other toys. The owners then moved into a second room and asked their dog to find each of the test toys – one at a time. To minimize disruption, the owner replaced the chosen toys only when there were only three test toys left in the pile. The researchers watched online via video recording devices.
The experiment was performed twice for each dog, and was also repeated for four of the dogs with their remaining test toys.
The results show that overall the dogs chose the correct toy an average of 44% of the time – with some having a success rate of up to 60%. These numbers, the researchers add, are well above the level expected by chance.
The results were driven by the ability of four dogs, with these dogs remembering the names of between three and nine of their test toys.
The team stresses that just because some dogs can learn object names, not every dog can, with the factors behind the skill still unclear.
However, Dror noted that dogs with the talent often had owners who spent a lot of time with them. “The more you invest in your dog, the more you’ll get back from the relationship,” she said.
